"Microsoft's phone chief hates to call the new Nokia Lumia 521 cheap, but the lower-priced smartphone launching in the United States is the company's boldest move yet to win mass market share from leaders Apple and Samsung. The world's largest software company has so far focused on putting its Windows Phone software into expensive, high-end devices - chiefly from Nokia and HTC. But the new model will go on sale at Walmart later this month at an unsubsidized price under $150, relatively cheap for a new phone running up-to-date software without a long-term contract." Windows Phone is racing to the bottom just as fast as Android - with the difference being that expensive Android devices do not fail to sell.

A little over 11 years ago Microsoft bet the farm on something called The .NET Framework. It was a Windows only clone of the Java runtime environment. This turned out to be a poor decision. I (and many others) knew from the beginning it was a failure.

The .NET is not a clone of the JVM, and in fact deviates from it in ways that the JVM is only now starting to catch up.

The .NET Framework has seen numerous releases, with the most recent release this past Fall. Visual Studio 2012 is written in a combination of C#, C++, and WPF using mixed mode technologies pioneered in .NET .

The Windows Phone app store with 150,000 applications are apps written in .NET, the Windows Store with 60,000 applications is almost completely filled with apps written in .NET .

Silverlight, an Adobe Flash clone

Silverlight started off as WPF/E, or WPF Everywhere. It is a browser based implementation of their WPF framework which works across Windows, Linux, OSX, and Windows Phone.

The technologies pioneered in WPF and Silverlight form the core of Windows today. Windows 8 and its app model are based entirely on technologies pioneered in .NET .

The metadata format for WinRT is .NET metadata, the entire API surface is inspired by things in .NET and C# like async/await, Generics, and attribute based programming. C++/CX? Inspired by C# .

The .NET Framework has spawned a vibrant community (Codeplex, Nuget, various hubs around the internet) which is basically Microsoft's personal developer army.

According to Microsofties, there were around 8 MILLION .NET developers a year ago.

How in hell is this even remotely considered a failure, especially when you take into account the fact that Silverlight is a portable version of .NET called CoreCLR. CoreCLR now forms the basis for the .NET framework in WinRT and on Windows Phone.

.NET has been one of Microsoft's unmistakable successes. It just defies logic that you'd claim otherwise. It was the best strategic move for the Developer Division in decades.

.NET was the moment when things started going bad, and Microsoft is looking at finally dropping it. Maybe there is hope.

This is why people who have no idea what .NET is shouldn't talk about .NET .

The Surface has made Microsoft a couple hundred MILLION dollars in less than a quarter with limited availability (The Surface Pro is available in the US, Canada, and very recently China). Even then, some reports had Windows 8 up to 7.5% of the market.

Surface Pro retails for $800 dollars. Microsoft's ASP on their tablet offerings are incredibly high, to the point where they can extract quite a bit of revenue from a modest amount of volume.

"The .NET is not a clone of the JVM, and in fact deviates from it in ways that the JVM is only now starting to catch up."

I found the framework and design of .net was almost a blatant ripoff of java. I'd be surprised to find many .net features that didn't already exist in java first. MS built .net because they failed in capturing the java market with their proprietary java variant J++.

That said, I've always liked .net language syntaxes much better than java. Java's designers refused to address certain widespread criticisms, among them checked exceptions and unnecessarily tedious typecasting frequently put me off when prototyping. Java had a duality of official GUI frameworks, but the Java2D classes didn't work in applets. Also, there was a big regression for write once & run everywhere in mobile applications (not through any fault of sun, still a real set back though).

I'd say c# is a serious contender for being my favorite programming language, but neither windows nor IIS are particularly compelling for the web work I do. Microsoft obviously has conflicted interests, but if they would support .net on linux I would be all over it.

Some companies want their sites hosted on a Microsoft webserver. I never understood why. Unless of cause you'd like to play Minesweeper on that server ;-) The monolithic nature of Windows makes programs complex and vulnerable. And you can't compile custom kernels, so you're stuck with "everything & the kitchen sink".

Could it be that this monolithic nature (in contrast to the modular Unix-approach) is a big reason behind the slow development of WP8?

I found the framework and design of .net was almost a blatant ripoff of java. I'd be surprised to find many .net features that didn't already exist in java first. MS built .net because they failed in capturing the java market with their proprietary java variant J++.

C# was Java done right, tbh I don't care where it came from it is irrelevant.

Also Java != JVM.

I'd say c# is a serious contender for being my favorite programming language, but neither windows nor IIS are particularly compelling for the web work I do. Microsoft obviously has conflicted interests, but if they would support .net on linux I would be all over it.

There is always mono, though I don't really understand what is wrong with IIS and Windows.

You're going to have to say exactly why the .NET Framework is a "blantant rip off". The only commonality between the two is that they're two languages which use a VM.

Its important to consider the fact that JVM as it is now, is not the JVM as it was 10 years ago. The same is true of the CLR, but when the CLR was launched it included features which leapfrogged the JVM in fundamental ways.

The way the metadata and bytecode are structured in the CLR are very different from the JVM internally, and if you read some of the papers published around that time, you can see the rationale for the differences. The JVM wasn't even JIT compiled at the time when the CLR came out.

Even today, the CLR and the JVM diverge in important ways. HotSpot supports dynamic recompilation of hot paths in the application and iirc still falls back to the interpeter under a host of scenarios. The CLR supports a straight up JIT compiler, some AOT options with NGEN, and Cloud Compilation using new machine specific IL on Windows Phone.

I think its more fair to say that the CLR was inspired by the JVM and other technologies at the time, but a rip off or a knock off clone? I think that is unfair, given how different they are architecturally.

C# similarly included some concrete improvements, though this is a little closer to Java, likely for familiarity.

I'm definitely not the biggest fan of MS, but wasn't just last year people were complaining that MS was trying to make everything .Net? On a personal note I find C# to be such a joy to use that I use it to program linux software more than Windows software.

The .NET Framework has seen numerous releases, with the most recent release this past Fall. Visual Studio 2012 is written in a combination of C#, C++, and WPF using mixed mode technologies pioneered in .NET .

The Windows Phone app store with 150,000 applications are apps written in .NET, the Windows Store with 60,000 applications is almost completely filled with apps written in .NET .

Silverlight started off as WPF/E, or WPF Everywhere. It is a browser based implementation of their WPF framework which works across Windows, Linux, OSX, and Windows Phone.

The technologies pioneered in WPF and Silverlight form the core of Windows today. Windows 8 and its app model are based entirely on technologies pioneered in .NET .

The .NET Framework has spawned a vibrant community (Codeplex, Nuget, various hubs around the internet) which is basically Microsoft's personal developer army.

According to Microsofties, there were around 8 MILLION .NET developers a year ago.

...

.NET has been one of Microsoft's unmistakable successes. It just defies logic that you'd claim otherwise. It was the best strategic move for the Developer Division in decades.

...

The Surface has made Microsoft a couple hundred MILLION dollars in less than a quarter with limited availability (The Surface Pro is available in the US, Canada, and very recently China). Even then, some reports had Windows 8 up to 7.5% of the market.

Surface Pro retails for $800 dollars. Microsoft's ASP on their tablet offerings are incredibly high, to the point where they can extract quite a bit of revenue from a modest amount of volume.